Report from the Aleutians

 

Army Captain John Huston

REPORT FROM THE ALEUTIANS                       B                                                               USA  (47 mi)  1943  d: John Huston

Since there’s a Middle East war going on at the moment, maybe we should take a look back at one of America’s greatest film directors, John Huston, making a World War II-era documentary about life among American soldiers protecting Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as they prepare for combat, made while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, a film he narrates from a first-person perspective with assistance from his father Walter Huston, editing it himself, occasionally accompanied by a Dimitri Tiomkin score, nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.  Unlike many wartime films glorifying combat, this prioritizes the monotony and endurance required in this remote, fog-bound theater, where soldiers faced constant dampness, mud, and isolation, a quiet and contemplative film that focuses on the everyday lives of soldiers, prioritizing operational realism, offering a unique and intimate perspective on the war, the first of four documentary films Huston made while serving in the army, having already made WINNING YOUR WINGS (1942), a recruitment film for the Army Air Forces hosted by Jimmy Stewart, following this film with THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO (1945), revealing the failures of America’s intelligence agencies that led to alarming deaths, which the War Department rejected because it was perceived as promoting an anti-war message, believing it would be “demoralizing to men who were going into combat for the first time.”  Having been subjected to perpetual German artillery shelling and prolonged aerial bombing operations during the filming, Huston would experience reoccurring nightmares and psychological distress, which led him to make his most personal war documentary, LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946), among the first films to examine the effects of war and post-traumatic stress, which was censored for 35 years, until 1981.  After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hollywood studio executives, directors, actors, and film industry professionals either volunteered or accepted commissions to enlist in the armed forces to help rally public support for the war effort.   Around that same time, director John Ford made THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942), an 18-minute short filming the Japanese aerial assault of Midway Island as it happened, a montage of battle footage and voiceover narrators, the first and most influential of the government-sponsored combat reports, which resulted in two 16mm cameras destroyed and the director wounded, one of four films to win an Academy Award in the inaugural year for Documentary Feature.  The Office of War Information (OWI) was less pleased with the Huston documentaries, finding them more problematic, often placing veterans in a less than flattering light, where the faded images and sound quality of this film feel crudely raw, reflective of the difficulties involved with the equipment. 

Huston’s second documentary for the war effort is a record of the construction of an air base on the barren Adak Island in the Aleutians, consisting of more than 200 islands in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, stretching over 1,200 miles toward Russia, where this chain includes 57 volcanoes and features what may be the foggiest, rainiest, and windiest weather in the United States, with no trees to speak of on the islands and very little brush, with soft, spongy tundra making maneuvering difficult, as vehicles would sink into the water-logged, volcanic soil, providing enormous tactical and logistic difficulty for those assigned there.  Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, perhaps hoping to divert attention away from Midway, the Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island in the Aleutians for two days in June 1942, establishing military garrisons on the islands of Attu and Kiska, taking the few inhabitants as prisoners, though this assault may have actually intended to complement the Midway operation, with the purpose of setting the conditions for a Japanese occupation of the Aleutian Islands, which in turn was to prevent the United States from using them as a base to attack Japan from the north, as Adak Island is closer to Japan than any other American outpost.  To this day, it remains one of the few sites in the United States to be subjected to an aerial bombardment by a foreign power.  For various reasons, the Aleutians campaign, which continued into the summer of 1943, has remained obscure in comparison to the Guadalcanal campaign and the Allied landings in North Africa, part of which is due to the utter geographic remoteness of the area and the extremely hostile weather conditions, and also because both the United States and Japan deployed only the minimal forces necessary in comparison with other theaters of operation, where the fifteen-month struggle is often referred to as the “Forgotten War.”  It is, however, the only campaign that included ground combat on American soil in the Western Hemisphere in World War II.  With Huston spending 6 months on the island with the troops, the campaign in the Aleutians was characterized by an uneven pace of sea and air actions, dependent as much on weather conditions as on available forces, with the film depicting the down time contending with the everpresent snow, mud, and rain, striking for its banality, featuring unglamorous depictions of base life, including drab images of latrine cleaning and mess hall meals, with troops besieged by boredom, as there is literally nothing for miles due to the extreme isolation.  Yet it also shows the indomitable spirit and heroic effort involved in preparing for the attack on Japanese-occupied Kiska and Attu Islands, made before the August 1943 invasion, which was a joint American/Canadian effort, punctuated by occasional bombing raid rehearsals, with actual B-17 and B-24 bombing raid footage seen at the end of the film.    

Having already made an important Hollywood film, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), Huston, along with John Ford, William Wyler, and Frank Capra were called upon to document the developing conflict.  The film was shot in Technicolor on 16mm by Huston, Rey Scott, and four others during the fall and winter of 1942, compiling footage obtained by different members of the unit on fifteen different flight missions, suffering through the same hazards and hardships experienced by the troops, where it’s impressive to build an airstrip in just 36 hours against formidable odds, as foul weather was a constant issue, with heavy fog and ice enveloping the aircraft, along with fierce wind storms exceeding 100 mph, where it seems impossible to fly in these harsh conditions, grounding aircraft for up to 80% of days.  Weather and the remote terrain may have been more of an obstacle than the Japanese troops awaiting them, as soldiers played cards, grew out their beards, and were forced to survive on meager rations, taking to reading each other’s mail to avoid the tedium, yet were also seen singing and playing music.  Among the more harrowing scenes is a funeral sequence where a pilot shot down was laid to rest, yet the message seems to be in jingoistic support, offering patriotic conviction and optimism, always wanting to project a completely successful mission.  Most of the film stresses the readiness and alertness of the air squadrons, who were called upon to protect a major flank from the advancing Japanese, with Scott going over Kiska targets nine times in six days, while Huston himself had two close brushes with death, one of them during a crash landing, and the other when a 20mm enemy shell struck his aircraft during a mission, fatally wounding the waist gunner beside him.  Coming before the advancement of commercial aircraft, which was largely developed in the 50’s and 60’s, this was happening at a time when flying was still a novelty, where big four-engine, propeller bomber planes were an innovation at the time.  Dwelling extensively on take-offs and landings of smaller fighter planes, which were used in air combat against the Japanese “Zero” planes, it’s important to stress the spectacular nature of aviation, which Huston effortlessly captures, yet the film provoked only a lukewarm response from the small audiences to see it, quickly pulled from movie theaters for revealing a top secret target, perhaps put off by the sorrowful tone and mood of regret that permeates war footage, as so many families are affected.  The Aleutian Islands campaign led to the loss of 1,481 American lives, along with 4,350 Japanese soldiers.  More than 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the Pacific theater during the course of the war, compared with the 15 to 20 million killed in Europe, offering us a chance to reflect on so many soldiers who died to protect our free way of life.

Report From The Aleutians - Full Movie | John Huston, Walter ...  Entire movie may be seen on YouTube (46:53)